Extended crashkernel command line

This patch adds a extended crashkernel syntax that makes the value of reserved
system RAM dependent on the system RAM itself:

    crashkernel=<range1>:<size1>[,<range2>:<size2>,...][@offset]
    range=start-[end]

For example:

    crashkernel=512M-2G:64M,2G-:128M

The motivation comes from distributors that configure their crashkernel
command line automatically with some configuration tool (YaST, you know ;)).
Of course that tool knows the value of System RAM, but if the user removes
RAM, then the system becomes unbootable or at least unusable and error
handling is very difficult.

This series implements this change for i386, x86_64, ia64, ppc64 and sh.  That
should be all platforms that support kdump in current mainline.  I tested all
platforms except sh due to the lack of a sh processor.

This patch:

This is the generic part of the patch.  It adds a parse_crashkernel() function
in kernel/kexec.c that is called by the architecture specific code that
actually reserves the memory.  That function takes the whole command line and
looks itself for "crashkernel=" in it.

If there are multiple occurrences, then the last one is taken.  The advantage
is that if you have a bootloader like lilo or elilo which allows you to append
a command line parameter but not to remove one (like in GRUB), then you can
add another crashkernel value for testing at the boot command line and this
one overwrites the command line in the configuration then.

Signed-off-by: Bernhard Walle <bwalle@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2 files changed